100 hours of continuous rain
N 30°04'12.9'' E 102°59'19.7''
Date:
21.03.2016
Day: 267
Country:
China
Province:
Sichuan
Location:
Panta bear breeding station
Bifeng Valley
Latitude N:
30°04’12.9”
Longitude E:
102°59’19.7”
Daily kilometers:
82 km
Total kilometers:
15,974 km
As the crow flies:
59.38 km
Average speed:
18.5 km/h
Maximum speed:
47.5 km/h
Travel time:
4:23 hrs.
Soil condition:
Asphalt
Maximum height:
1.150 m
Total altitude meters:
26.564 m
Altitude meters for the day:
1.100 m
Sunrise:
07:11 am – 07:10 am
Sunset:
7:19 pm – 7:21 pm
Temperature day max:
16°C
Temperature day min:
9°C
Departure:
09:30 a.m.
Arrival time:
5:00 pm
(Photos of the diary entry can be found at the end of the text).
At 7:00 a.m. we are already sitting in the sober, unheated dining room of the hotel. The breakfast buffet is sometimes included in the room rate. Although they don’t necessarily serve what Europeans imagine for breakfast, we choose the few dishes that are not quite as spicy or have a foreign taste. While Ajaci sits next to the packed bikes, I fill my stomach with an egg and tomato mixture. Assuming that no flavor enhancers have been added and that I feel very hungry, I eat with a big appetite. Later I regret my excessiveness again, but it’s always the same: if you don’t want to hear, you have to feel.
It’s been raining for hours. The weather forecast for the coming week is nothing short of a disaster. Before we get into the saddle, we put on our rain gear. Some Chinese shake their heads and point to the sky. We laugh, shrug our shoulders, say goodbye and pedal off. Despite the rain, we make good progress. After 60 km we pass the rainy city of Ya’an. From here, a narrow road leads us another 22 km into the mountains. We are now completely filthy. Mud sticks to our clothes, panniers and trailers. Not since we left Siberia 9 months ago have we been anywhere near this dirty. We slowly wind our way along the serpentines. Smaller and larger waterfalls cascade down the mountain sides on both sides of the mountain road. Bamboo forests stretch upwards until they are swallowed up by dense cloud cover. We work our way towards the clouds meter by meter. The food keeps coming back to me. The wetness has long since worked its way through the rainwear. Our feet are literally swimming in the shoes. We stop for a few minutes to catch our breath, then continue through the constant rain. “How are you?” I ask Tanja. “Good, and you?” it calls behind me. “I feel a bit sick,” I reply, trying to suppress the unpleasant feeling as much as possible. Meanwhile, the pass road winds even more steeply upwards. We shift back and forth between first and third gear to be able to cope with the incline at all. Today’s destination is the Bifengxia Panda Base, (literally translated; valley of the green mountain top) to which some panda bears were evacuated from other breeding stations after the earthquake in Sichuan province in 2008.
When we reach the highest point at around 1,100 meters, we find ourselves in a large parking lot surrounded by buildings and small stalls. We look around, somewhat perplexed. My gaze falls on a few strange-looking, smoked creatures hanging on hooks, waiting for buyers. Cloudy green mountains overgrown with bamboo forests frame the plateau-like location. “And where is our accommodation supposed to be here?” I wonder. “I’ll ask the security guard there,” Tanja replies. But he shakes his head. While Tanja dials the telephone number of the hotel where we have already booked a room from Chengdu, a handful of people gather around her. Suddenly the doorbell rings right next to her. A man opens his cell phone and speaks into it. When Tanja and he realize they are talking to each other on the phone, even though they are standing right next to each other, they look at each other in surprise at first. “What a coincidence,” says Tanja with a laugh. In fact, the young Chinese man is one of the owners of the hotel. He tells us to follow his car. Two kilometers further on, in a tiny mountain valley, we end up in front of a few ugly clinker brick buildings that look completely out of place in this beautiful landscape. “Zheli”, (here) he says curtly, pointing to a three-storey, angular block of a house, and disappears. A woman, probably the mother, steps out of the building and gives us an artificial smile. I ask if I can use the water hose lying around outside the entrance to spray our bikes clean. She nods. Then, after a long negotiation, we are allowed to store our bikes in the ice-cold, large anteroom of the house, where the guests also eat their meals. After the bikes are stowed away and locked, I help Tanja lug our equipment up to the third floor. We move into one of the few rooms with air conditioning. Shivering, I switch it on immediately and lo and behold, it works. As soon as everything is stowed away in the room, we stretch a washing line from the bathroom to the door to hang up some of the soaking wet clothes. “With the humidity, it will probably take days for everything to dry out again,” I say, taking off my wet shoes in which a small lake is sloshing around. “Well, the main thing is that we’ve found a dry place to stay up here in the mountains. I’m glad I don’t have to sleep in a tent in this awful weather. In comparison, simple huts are like a castle in these conditions,” Tanja replies. “Not just for you,” I say, standing under the shower with hot water gurgling out of it. In order not to strain my stomach any further, I eat plain rice in the evening and vow to be twice as careful in future when it comes to adding weijing (flavor enhancers) to my food…
If you would like to find out more about our adventures, you can find our books under this link.
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